Press Photos/Katie BarnesA fun place to work: "I'd just go off into these deep, wild adventures," Janet Cocciarelli says of her childhood. Imagination still fuels the executive director of the Grand Rapids Children's Museum. "The way she thinks about things and dreams about things is very vivid," says her husband, Alan Fanta. "Her imagination just goes and goes and goes."

For a few minutes, Janet Cocciarelli is adrift in the ocean again, her trusty stuffed dog, T-Bone, in nail-biting peril.

"The living room was an ocean, and chairs were sailboats," she recalls of her childhood. "T-Bone would almost fall out of the boat. I'd have to grab him. The sharks would almost get him."

She smiles.

"I remember it so well."

Cocciarelli is tall now and well-dressed, with an impressive resume and an Italian espresso machine.

But there's still a kid in there, inside the accomplished woman who wrote food bank legislation in Texas, trekked through Thailand and worked in Ghana, Africa.

Cocciarelli leads play group with staff

In 1973: With dog Fanny.

Five things to know about Janet Cocciarelli

• She's a coffee hound. "I'm on a constant quest to make the best cup of coffee." She has an Italian espresso machine at home and goes to Seattle for Coffee Fest.

• She hasn't watched TV in 20 years. "I think the last thing I watched was the first episode of 'Friends.' I thought, 'This is really boring.'" It's mostly off limits to her young sons, too.

• A foodie, she loves to make complicated desserts from cookbooks with names such as "Paris Sweets." "My husband always says, 'It's a sad day for Janet when there's no heavy whipping cream in the fridge.'"

• She feels nature is sacred, thanks to growing up around woods and water in Cheboygan. When her family lived in Texas, her son, Mathias, looked at the backs of her hands and, "He asked me why my veins were blue." She smiles. "I told him it's because Lake Michigan runs through them."

Cocciarelli, 43, is the executive director of the Grand Rapids Children's Museum. She took over in March after longtime leader Teresa Thome left to focus on the television production company that produces the Emmy Award-winning children's program "Come On Over!"

Cocciarelli has lived and worked all over the world. Her sense of adventure helps define her. Her first job out of college was in Tokyo, and she doggedly pursued her dream job in Africa, working for a government agency that offers aid to people struggling overseas.

A mother of two young boys -- Mathias, 6, and Christien, 1 -- she's a back-to-nature mom who craves the outdoors, poo-poos TV and canned ravioli and joined a group of moms who take turns traveling to a dairy for raw milk.

She revels in the simple act of play. Get her talking about her childhood adventures, and Cocciarelli is 6 again.

"There were mummies in the basement and they'd be coming upstairs," she says, sitting in her office at the children's museum. On the other side of her glass walls, youngsters shout and giggle, whipping up breakfast with toy pots and pans and plastic pancakes.

All this adventure happened in Cheboygan, where Cocciarelli grew up with her parents, Lelio Cocciarelli and Carol Bradstrom, and three sisters. She's the youngest.

"I lived in nature," she says. "I got up, headed to the woods and built tree forts. There was a huge pond in the woods that we were forbidden to go near. We'd build rafts and pretend to be Huck Finn."

"She was a kid who had guts," says big sister Katherine Cocciarelli. "She was willing to try anything. If her big sisters were doing it, she wanted to do it."

Her dad encouraged her to strive, save and be financially independent.

"My dad would say, 'You're not gonna stay in Cheboygan and work for Woolworth's.'"

She didn't. Cocciarelli earned a bachelor's degree from Michigan State University, studying economics and political science.

"Cheboygan became smaller and smaller for me," Cocciarelli says. "This country seemed to be doing just fine to me. I wanted to make a difference in the world." She yearned to work abroad, and started making Her Plan.

Off to Tokyo

It started with a move that everybody thought was nuts. She met a representative from Berlitz, the language instruction company, who told her if she was ever in Tokyo, stop by for a possible job interview.

In Tokyo in 1987: At her first job out of college, she was earning Japanese yen. "In the '80s, the yen was strong compared to the dollar," she says. "I paid off my student loans in one year."

Cocciarelli sold her car and bought a plane ticket to Tokyo.

"I didn't speak Japanese, I couldn't read the signs, I had no idea where their office was," she recalls with a laugh. "I had $700 to my name. All I had was a ride to the hotel from the airport and a hope for an interview."

"That was about her having courage," Katherine Cocciarelli says, "about her saying, 'I can do it.' She has always been that way."

"After all that, the guy had to hire me," Cocciarelli says.

He did. She worked for Berlitz teaching U.S. business practices to Japanese business people who were relocating to the U.S.

"I had everything planned out," she says. "My long-term goal was to work in Africa. Tokyo was one way to get me working overseas."

While in Tokyo, she traveled with a friend to Thailand, China and Hong Kong.

"We stayed in little shacks and dumps because we wanted our money to last," she says. Led by a guide, they journeyed through remote areas of Thailand and Burma. The world she yearned to see wasn't always pleasant.

"Kids who were 4, 5 and 6 were sitting on their bottoms in wood-working factories in Thailand carving doors for wealthy people overseas," she says. "It made me a shopper for a better world.

"The biggest thing I came back with was a desire to live a life that makes an impact," she says. "It changed everything." She was reducing her carbon footprint before it was hip, turning off lights, lowering her heat, riding her bike instead of using her car, buying American.

She wanted government experience, so her next stop was working for the governor of Wisconsin while getting her master's degree in developmental economics, focusing on the economics of Third World countries.

She met her husband, Alan Fanta, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was getting his doctorate in chemistry.

Her dream job was to work in Africa for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.

The government organization offers aid to struggling people overseas.

She decided to learn French, an official language of several African countries. So after grad school, she planned to move to France to become more fluent.

Then Alan asked her to marry him.

"I thought, 'Hmmmm. I'm going to France and then Africa. How do you fit in?'"

She grins. "This really threw a wrench in my plans."

They got married in 1991 and moved to France together. The newlyweds traveled all over Europe in an old, broken-down Renault. They lived paycheck to paycheck, eating powdered soup and frozen french fries to afford a rented flat on the Mediterranean. "We were culturally rich and resource poor," she says.

But when Janet talked about moving to Africa for five years, "that was an issue," Alan says. If he spent five years in Africa, he would never get a job, he told her.

"He moved to France for me," she says. "It was my turn to support him."

Wisconsin and Ghana

Alan got a job at 3M in Minneapolis. But luck was with Cocciarelli.

"Lo and behold, I saw an ad in the newspaper that the University of Minnesota was looking for a research fellow to work for USAID on a research project in Ghana," she says. "I said, 'That is my job.' So I found myself on a plane to Ghana."

It was an economic development project in conjunction with the Smithsonian, designed to boost the tourism in Ghana. It involved restoring the slave castles of the 1400s for tourists, as well as preserving some tropical rain forests to lure eco-tourists.

Cocciarelli split her time between Wisconsin and Ghana, spending a month at a time in Ghana.

"When she would talk about her travels, she opened up the rest of the world to us," says sister Katherine, 52, a licensed therapist who teaches psychology at Michigan Technological University.

"She would describe the sun in Africa and the colors and textures of the clothing. She talked about the food and bread in France, and what a difference there was between the lives of men and women in Japan.

"She became a part of it all, and she became more inclusive," Katherine says. "She doesn't edit out people who don't fit a certain profile. Coming from a little town in northern Michigan, we were very sheltered."

But after three years of travel to Ghana, it was getting old. The couple wanted children.

"I said, 'You know what? I have these issues in my own backyard," Cocciarelli says. "Hunger. Access for women to economic opportunities. There's plenty I can do in my own backyard."

Her next backyard was in Austin, Texas, where she was executive director of the Texas Food Banks Association.

She traveled through rural Texas and saw stunning poverty. That notion she'd had a few years back about this country doing just fine? She was wrong.

"Poverty in rural Texas will bring you to your knees," she says. "I had no idea the need was so great. We were feeding one-sixth of the Texas population. That's 3 million people a year."

Press Photos/Katie BarnesStill a kid at heart: Cocciarelli builds a tower with fellow employees during a recent "play drill" at the museum. "It takes a lot of her time and thought, even when she's home," her husband, Alan Fanta, says of the children's museum. "After the kids are in bed, she's back on the computer, finishing things she didn't get to earlier."

Cocciarelli supervised a program called Texas Second Chance, which allowed prisoners to work at local food banks. She increased the food bank budget by 200 percent and doubled its staff in two years. She traveled into Mexico to work with food banks there to teach about fundraising.

But she was frustrated by a maddening predicament.

"Farmers wanted to donate fresh produce to food banks, but they had to harvest it, wash it, sort it, pack it, transport it," she says. "All that was expensive. My food bank didn't have enough money to do that. So produce would rot in the field while people were going hungry."

So Cocciarelli wrote a bill that was passed by the Texas Legislature, providing $500,000 every two years to cover the cost of getting donated produce to food banks.

She spent time in corporate philanthropy, guiding a company's projects that sent inner-city kids to college, collected coats and shoes for struggling schools and helped women's shelters.

The move to Grand Rapids

Then Alan was laid off from his job at 3M, and got a job at Lacks Enterprises in Grand Rapids. The family moved here last year and Cocciarelli reveled in being a stay-at-home mom.

On a recent night after supper, she kicked around a blue soccer ball in their East Grand Rapids backyard with Alan and 6-year-old Mathias, while toddler Christien sat in the grass and watched.

"I'm smokin' you by 14 points, Mom," Mathias calls happily as he scores.

"Remember what we talked about," Cocciarelli pants as she boots the ball toward the rose garden.

"There go the roses," Alan observes.

"It doesn't matter who wins or loses," she says to the grinning Mathias, "just that you have fun."

Fun is a big thing with her. One of the first things Cocciarelli did after moving to Grand Rapids was join the Grand Rapids Children's Museum.

When she read last winter that the museum was looking for a new director, something clicked.

"I came full circle," she says, smiling as kids outside her office window build a tower out of plastic blocks. "This mission speaks to me. It allows me to give other children what my parents so naturally gave me. It's very personal."

"She sees all around her where unstructured play has vanished," says Alan, 45, a technical director at Lacks Enterprises. "She believes the museum is one of the last places to get this."

Next year, the museum launches an infant and toddler project, creating spaces throughout the museum specifically for tots from newborn to age 3. Cocciarelli leans forward in her chair excitedly as she tells about it.

Press Photos/Katie BarnesIndoor play: Grand Rapids Children's Museum Director Janet Cocciarelli often brings her family to the museum on Thursday nights for Family Night. They are her husband, Alan Fanta, and sons Mathias, 6 and Christien, 1. "The playfulness is still there," says her big sister Katherine Cocciarelli.